Worldwide air traffic is projected to double every ten to fourteen years and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) forecasts world air travel growth of five percent per annum until the year 2020. Such growth may cause degradation in safety and performance and an increase in an already high workload of the flight crew. One of the negative influences on flight safety has been has been the ability of an aircrew to determine which information is important to the current situation from information received from a plurality of sources.
Modern aircraft contain visual display systems that provide pilots and/or flight crews with substantial amounts of important navigation, operational and situational awareness information, including information about the environment and terrain outside the aircraft. Intelligently sifting through such information can significantly improve situational awareness of the flight crew resulting in increased flight safety and performance.
Flight operations are impacted by many conditions outside the aircraft. The trend in aviation modernization is to provide information about these conditions to the flight deck through a variety of methods, transmission sources, databases, and interfaces. The flight crew could simultaneously be receiving information from air traffic control (ATC), aircraft operations center (AOC), airport services, weather services, other flights, and other ground systems. Data sources include digital notice to airmen (D-NOTAMS), digital automatic terminal information service (D-ATIS), aviation routing meteorology weather report (METAR), controller-pilot data link communications (CPDLC) messages, and chart notes. While these disparate information sources can provide critical operational information to the flight deck, the overhead of processing it and transforming the data into the ‘BIG PICTURE’ is burdensome on the flight crew. First, flight crew members must remember to look for data relevant to the mission or flight, and check for the timeliness or currency for each of these data sources. Then, for each source, they investigate, or search, various flight deck user interfaces to find the information and process it. Flight crews typically search all sources at once due to the available time required for each task, and therefore have to update their operational awareness with separate pieces of the awareness picture across a time frame. For some sources, the content may not be relevant for the current flight, but the flight crew still has to spend valuable time reviewing all messages. Some of these messages could also be updated, making previous messages obsolete. Currently, the flight crew has to spend time reviewing the messages to realize this. These issues are exacerbated since humans are, in general, not adept at integrating information over time and space into an actionable awareness. Furthermore, many of these information sources are integrated into the approach briefing which occurs at a high workload and stress phase of flight.
At these critical phases of flight, the flight crew has less operational flexibility to respond to some situation identified in the digital content. Currently, standard operating procedures are followed dictating when certain information is reviewed. Early notification of an evolving situation would vastly improve the flight crew's ability to handle the situation without resorting to last minute changes that could negatively impact pilot workload, flight safety, fuel costs, and on time performance. Late notification often puts flight crew under time pressure to select a course of action which is very difficult under stress and without up-to-date awareness. If these situations evolve when there are performance issues on the aircraft, the flight crew now also has to evaluate the operational impact before selecting a course of action.
Electronic instrumentation displays continue to advance in sophistication, achieving increasingly higher levels of information density and, consequently, presenting a greater amount of visual information to be perceived and understood by the operator, e.g., the pilot. It is important that visual displays provide a proper cognitive mapping between what the operator is trying to achieve and the information available to accomplish the task.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system and method of compiling information from multiple sources and presenting only important current information to assist the flight crew to evaluate the current situation, leading to improved economy and safety. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.